“Say it in broken English”

Marianne Faithfull

There‘s some kind of hermetic connection

between Nana Mouskouri’s spectacles

the machine gun ammo belt tattoo on an anarchist boy’s biceps

and this foreign tongue

that I torture

my friend coghnorti almost touched it

when he spoke about the rudeness of writing or accepting to sing

a fermata on the word “slaves”

Another example: this very moment I am writing poetry

contained in a cozy airtight room

asking “what is this?”

on the news a fortified cauldron prepares warm goulash

for Hungarians ONLY

coghnorti puts his tact aside 

and screams at me with fuming anger:

“Eunøugh!”

[This flooding of symbols, this western neuroticism, my fellow poets?

Oh, how very ridiculous indeed.]